By Hubert Saint-Onge
Organizational silos, fear of failure, and defensive reactions attenuate the ability to deal with market changes, let alone see them. The most potent gravitational force in organizations is, over time, to follow the well-worn groves of habitual responses. Grounded in what has worked in the past, these organizations gradually drift towards becoming reliability-driven and become impervious to emergent trends in the marketplace. Eventually, these organizations stop learning.
Collaboration brings together experienced people from different specializations and functions. They know how things work from a different perspective. This allows them to see and question practices that people immersed over time in a given context no longer notice. Collaboration places people in a position to notice and opens new windows to missed opportunities.
Instilling collaboration across the enterprise and with partners is one of the most potent ways to accelerate the necessary organizational responses to changes in the business environment. This is the primary rationale for leadership to explicitly strive to advance multidisciplinary responses that will counter the inevitable tendency to inertia and build a more proactive organization. Managing across disciplines and functions is fundamental to the success of organizations in a business context that combines the accelerating velocity of change with increasing complexity. Through collaboration, people develop connections across the enterprise and become familiar with other facets of the organization, contributing to greater agility, integration and cohesiveness.
While technology has significantly enhanced connectivity in most organizations, the challenge of leveraging collaboration persists. In a previous blog, I showed how leaders can identify emerging interdependence points in their organizations and advocated for prioritizing collaboration at these intersections to enhance their effectiveness. However, despite the widespread discussion on this topic, there is a noticeable lack of awareness among leaders on implementing collaboration effectively. Organizational leadership must take the lead in fostering a more systemic approach to collaborative work.
This article addresses this challenge by exploring the dynamics of collaborative interactions and outlining guiding principles for leaders to launch and orchestrate organization-wide collaboration.
The potential impact of collaboration
Collaboration can build bridges among individuals within a team, across organizational boundaries such as lines of business or functions, and between different organizations. Setting up workgroups with varying perspectives on the reality of the market and freeing them from conforming to past practices can lead to debunking existing beliefs and practices that no longer fit current market conditions. Building a web of collaborative work enhances the organization’s agility, integration, and cohesiveness. For instance, when a large US packaged goods company saw its growth potential shift from more mature markets to Asia and Latin America, their more experienced resources in Marketing and other functions were based in mature markets in the United States and Europe. The solution was to build collaborative networks between these two parts of the world to enhance its capabilities in the markets with more promising growth.
Bringing together team members with complementary capabilities from different parts of the organization allows them to exchange knowledge, share perspectives on what is happening in the market and accelerate the development of new ways to deal with emerging challenges. It is in this context that the benefits of collaboration include:
1. Working interdependently with a common purpose reinforces organizational agility;
2. Accessing capabilities across geographic and organizational boundaries to leverage them where needed;
3. Accelerating the generation of organizational capabilities;
4. Developing the ability to respond quickly to ‘horizontally’ address issues crossing vertical silos;
5. Elevating collaboration internally builds the foundation for external collaboration and partnerships;
6. Enhancing the ability to partner internally and externally;
7. Enhancing organizational agility.
With the growth of organizational complexity and specialization, the importance of collaboration keeps increasing. When strategically targeted, leveraging collaboration can be a crucial asset.
The dynamics of collaboration
Most collaboration work occurs outside of the organization's hierarchical management structure. When participants take time away from their formal roles to work on collaboration projects, their managers lose proximity to them. As a rule, collaboration teams plan their work without referring to the participants’ direct managers. It is no longer productive for these managers to provide the direction, alignment, and support now provided from within the collaboration team. The formal manager is replaced in the collaboration team by mutual accountability, which becomes the binding force that serves as the basis for coordinating the work of team members.
With mutual accountability, individuals are accountable to the other collaboration team members for meeting their commitments. As their formal manager recedes into the background, individual participants must assume their accountabilities with self-management. Effective collaboration relies on participants' self-initiation. Participants who cannot make this shift to take personal responsibility will fail to meet expectations in a high-functioning collaborative team.
Many participants in collaboration teams maintain their formal roles in the hierarchical structure and only spend part of their time on collaboration teamwork. Some end up working on more than one collaboration team. It becomes more difficult for formal managers to assess the workload placed on these participants. The onus is on participants to manage their workload. Inevitably, participants who are skillful at collaborating are sought after and sooner or later end up suffocated by the demands placed on them.
The all-too-often excessive burden of collaboration
While there is a compelling case for collaboration projects, leadership must carefully prioritize projects and assess their potential impact on participants before launching them. Recent research shows a widespread sense among participants that the collaboration load has become excessive. More collaboration than can be effectively managed creates what has been referred to as ‘collaboration drag.’ Gartner's research has revealed that 78% of organizational leaders report that collaboration projects require too many meetings, unproductive exchanges, and difficulty making decisions.
Rob Cross, a highly experienced expert on collaboration, reported in his recent research that the number of collaborative projects and the complexity of their demands overwhelm people in many organizations. In his recent book on this subject, he articulates that an increasing need for enterprise connectivity and collaboration could outstrip the capacity of some of the most valuable people in organizations. He advocates that leaders recognize the ‘invisible burden’ this imposes on critical resources. When companies indiscriminately promote collaboration, it becomes counterproductive, creating bottlenecks and diminishing organizational effectiveness. Systematically identifying interdependence points in their organization gives leaders the information to prioritize collaboration at the organizational intersections where it delivers the most benefits.
Guiding Principles for leaders to leverage collaboration
Establishing a collectively adopted set of principles upfront to guide collaboration is essential as a roadmap to ensure effectiveness and improve where necessary. These principles can serve as a compass, guiding the team's collaborative efforts to build greater capability, agility and performance.
1. Prioritize collaboration projects
Leaders must pay more attention to assessing projects' collaborative footprint and their demands on participants. They must consider potential participants' workloads before launching new projects and appointing them to specific roles. A more strategic prioritization of these projects is critical to their effectiveness.
This is particularly important because organizations often call upon the same people when launching collaboration teams. Research in a large engineering company showed that several construction managers and engineers single-handedly accounted for 35 percent of all collaboration. Launching collaboration teams without appropriate prioritization can burn out critical resources.
2. Assess the effectiveness of existing collaboration projects
Leaders should monitor the effectiveness of existing collaboration, with participants involved in taking collective stock of how well it works. The outcome should serve to sharpen everyone’s leadership practice on collaboration projects.
3. Put in place a collaboration framework with a minimal structure
Formalize the collaboration with minimal structure and no reporting relationships to ensure agility. Reporting relationships within a team often attenuates self-initiation. Collaboration projects best function as a self-managed work team with well-defined accountabilities for each member. A climate of mutual accountabilities drives and aligns the team. The team ensures that all its members understand the project’s objectives well and are committed to them. When this proves not to be the case, answers are worked through until everyone involved can commit. Only then can individual responsibilities be fully assumed to minimize ambiguity and align efforts.
4. Maintain the ethos of collaboration teams
The raison d’être of a collaboration team is to build synergy across their specializations and achieve something otherwise impossible. Conducting themselves in the spirit of their mandate is essential for these teams' integrity and success.
Collaboration teams foster an environment where members feel comfortable sharing ideas, concerns, and feedback. Collaborations typically do not evolve in a straight line, so team members must embrace learning from successes and failures. They adopt a growth mindset to learn from one another and their stakeholders.
Transparent communication is essential for fostering collaboration and preventing misunderstandings. Quality conversations are crucial for building trust within collaboration teams, and team members must be open to addressing issues and conflicts. It's essential to take the time to build understanding and learn about the assumptions of other team members rather than jumping to judgment. This approach helps work through disagreements, especially when facing intense work pressure. Speaking negatively about team members, either within or outside the team, goes against the principles that these teams must uphold. Team members must acknowledge and appreciate each other's contributions, provide mutual support, and celebrate achievements.
5. Appoint a sponsor
A senior leader should be appointed as project Sponsor to help clarify the collaboration's mandate and align the targeted outcomes with the organization’s mission, strategy, and goals.
The Sponsor does not assign tasks or roles; this is done through the team’s governance process. The sponsor must help cultivate a climate of mutual accountability in the project team without unduly interfering. The team should also be geared to celebrate members' highly impactful contributions without attenuating the commitment of others. A key responsibility of the Sponsor is to monitor the trust level demonstrated by participants and address underlying issues as they manifest themselves. Sponsors should have close enough oversight to intervene skillfully if the need arises without affecting the shared ownership of the team.
6. Create windows to bring the outside in
Embedding external stakeholders in collaboration projects creates significant opportunities to enhance capability and performance. For instance, research has shown that working closely with architects, engineers, and suppliers has resulted in greater profitability for construction companies' regional offices. Also, highly effective Client Service Teams have successfully built close collaboration between customers and manufacturing companies' internal functions such as Product Development, Engineering, and Production.
Internal collaboration networks can play a strategic role in connecting with external stakeholders. If a company has a low internal collaboration index, it will be challenging to partner externally.
7. Agree on escalation
When it is impossible to agree after a thorough discussion of the issues encountered, agreement is reached to jointly escalate the matter to the Sponsor for resolution. This ensures that collaboration teams don’t stay stuck.
Keeping track of instances when these principles are not applied is essential to preserve the effectiveness and integrity of collaboration efforts. Effective collaboration requires collective discipline.
Conclusion
Bringing together team members with complementary capabilities from different parts of the organization allows them to exchange knowledge, share perspectives on what is happening in the market, and accelerate the development of new ways to deal with emerging challenges. In this context, the full potential of collaboration can be realized.
With the growth of organizational complexity and specialization, the importance of collaboration keeps increasing. Although the benefits provide a strong rationale for collaboration, using it judiciously and systematically remains a blind spot in many organizations.
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